The Wright brothers and their fellow flying pioneers were egotistical, driven and brave. How else would they have succeeded in taming the skies?

ALL those seeking to celebrate the centenary of that famous first flight in a heavier-than-air machine at Kill Devil Hill, Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903, have a handicap to surmount. In the daring era of the early aviators, Wilbur and Orville Wright were ravens in a sky full of bluebirds. The fact that they were clever, dogged and bold cannot disguise the truth that the brothers were also malevolent.

James Tobin strives to make them more likeable by using their diminutive names throughout his biography: Wilbur Wright is called Will and Orville, his kid brother, Orv. Much is made of Wilbur's kindnesses towards their invalid mother and of the loyalty both boys showed to their father, a cantankerous bishop embroiled in seemingly eternal disputes with his Church of the United Brethren in Christ.

Richard Hallion, in a history of flight that covers boomerangs, kites, rockets, toy helicopters, hot-air balloons, airships and aeroplanes, shares Mr Tobin's admiration for the brothers' achievements. He quotes with enthusiasm Bill Gates's belief that the Wrights “created the single greatest cultural force since the invention of writing...bringing people, languages, ideas and values together”.

But, unlike Mr Tobin, he has no inhibitions in admitting that, thanks to their rigid upbringing, both brothers could also be obsessive, stubborn and suspicious. They were, in the words of one awed observer of their activities, “two of the workingest boys I ever saw”. Neither had any interest in women nor wanted to make friends outside their immediate family. When their sister, Katharine, married late in life, after Wilbur's death, Orville regarded it as a betrayal. He refused to attend the wedding or to have anything to do with Katharine afterwards.

The Wright brothers, in short, were nerds before their time; dour men clothed year-round in woollen suits, plain caps and shirts with starched collars. Other aviators rhapsodised about the joys of flight, and dreamt of treaties to demilitarise the skies. When Wilbur was asked what his machine was good for, he replied bluntly, “War”. Obsessed with money, the Wrights were ready to sell their invention to just about any country, however hostile to America. And with their interminable patent suits they richly earned their reputation as competition-stifling monopolists.

Stuck with the Wrights, Mr Tobin concentrates understandably on his subjects' deeds rather than on their characters. As a general historian of aviation, Mr Hallion is more fortunate in being able also to celebrate truly magnificent men and their flying machines: Ferdinand Adolf August Heinrich Graf von Zeppelin, for instance, and his mammoth dirigible. This testy count was not the sort to seek satisfaction in the courts. Once, when criticised, he promptly challenged his critic to a duel. Only the intervention of the Kaiser stayed his hand. Just as colourful was Clément Agnès Ader and his Eole, a flying machine based on his close observation of birds, flying insects and bats. Using chloroformed mice as bait, Ader used to catch eagles, cage them and then, while they were still woozy with the drug, gently move their wings and study their articulation.

By common consent, the most magnificent flyer of them all was Alberto Santos-Dumont, the subject of Paul Hoffman's biography. As the heir to a Brazilian coffee fortune, this fastidious, dapper, man-about-town in Paris had no need to profit from his aviation activities. He despised patents and, unlike the Wrights, made the blueprints of his engine-powered airships available to anybody. He ostentatiously gave away much of the prize-money he won to the poor and, as Mr Hoffman tells it, “saw the flying machine as a chariot of peace, bringing estranged cultures in contact with one another”.

Today's aerobatic pilots, the heroes of Joshua Cooper Ramo's book, have no such vision. They seek to thrill, not to inspire, their public. The author has himself caught the fever, and he writes so well that it is infectious. In “No Visible Horizon” he captures the exhilaration of flying at the very limits of a pilot's and a machine's endurance; and it is clear throughout that he enjoys nothing more than the mouth-parching risks of a stunt flight that causes his body to seize up, his hands to shake and his head to throb with pain. For the aerobatic elite this dangerous sport presents, he claims, a perfect act of faith, an epiphany, an early glimpse of heaven.

Some readers will share in the excitement of his pulsating prose. Others will put him in the same category as the stunt pilot who, he says, had “the adrenaline needs of a 14-year-old and the judgment of a toddler”. But most will concede, however grudgingly, that today's stuntmen are as brave as their pioneering forebears. One pilot in 50 dies in this auto-da-fé sport each year. The death toll among the early aviators was even higher, with the difference that theirs was a calling, not a sport. As Otto Lilienthal, the Prussian inventor of the hang-glider, once said: Opfer müssen gebracht werden (sacrifices must be made). He died a short while later, after a crash.